New High Tech Football Helmet May Prevent concussions

Every year, millions of people in the United States get concussed while participating in sports. Players in sports such as American football are particularly vulnerable to injuries that can have terrible long-term implications. Stanford University researchers, in collaboration with the business Savior Brain, have developed one potential method of safeguarding players: a football helmet with liquid shock absorbers that could minimize the impact of strikes to the head by one-third.

“Most of the members of our team have a personal connection to traumatic brain injury and we care deeply about ensuring long-term athlete brain health,” said Nicholas Cecchi, a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University and lead author of the study in Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology. Concussion and repeated head impacts are still a major problem in contact sports, and we believe that improved helmet technology can play an important role in reducing the risk of brain injury.

HARM abatement

Previous study by Stanford University’s Camarillo Lab revealed that liquid shock absorbers could improve protection in sports helmets. To investigate this, the team created a finite element model of an American football helmet with 21 liquid shock absorbers, which engineers use to simulate performance before production. This helmet was tested against simulations of the National Football League’s (NFL) helmet performance evaluation methodology, and its performance was compared to that of four current helmets.

Lower velocity hits were added to the evaluation methodology due to accumulating evidence that the cumulative effect of impacts that do not induce diagnosed concussions might have substantial health repercussions. They assessed the head kinematics for each hit to generate a Head Accelerate Response Metric (HARM) score, which is intended to assess helmet performance in the event of an impact. The kinematics were also entered into a head and brain model to calculate the strain on the brain.

33% reduction in impact

The findings indicated that the helmet with liquid shock absorbers might greatly lower the impact intensity and strain on the brain produced by head hits, potentially significantly reducing injuries. The helmet with liquid shock absorbers outperformed the conventional helmet types, producing the lowest HARM value in 33 of 36 distinct impact scenarios tested, with an average score reduction of a third.

The liquid helmet also received the highest “Helmet Performance Score,” a metric used in the NFL’s yearly helmet safety rankings that includes a weighting for how well a helmet protects against hits to various parts of the head. The’side upper’ portion of the helmet is the most heavily weighted because impacts here are most likely to cause concussions: the helmet with liquid shock absorbers reduced the HARM score in this area by 39-50% across all impact velocities without compromising protection in other areas of the helmet.

“The liquid technology offered an average improvement of over 30% for both low and high velocities,” said Dr. Yuzhe Liu, corresponding author, who completed the work as a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University. “It can dramatically reduce the loading on the brain that is experienced during all kinds of American football impacts.”

The team wants to dramatically modify the model to better protect players, such as by making changes to the facemask and chinstrap. They also intend to turn the model into a physical helmet that can be evaluated in real-world situations, as well as to build comparable helmets for other sports in the future. However, different levels of play or sports may require different metrics and design modifications.

“The next step for our team is to translate the computer model to a physical prototype,” said Cecchi. “After successfully completing that, we would also be interested in conducting human studies that could demonstrate either a reduction in concussion incidence or an attenuation of impact severity for sub-concussive impacts. We have plans to expand our implementation of liquid shock absorbers to more areas of the helmet, and more helmeted applications, to further improve brain safety for a wide variety of populations.”

Source Link